Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
California teachers, take the lead to stop the attacks on public education!
*****
The California Teachers Association (CTA) apparatus has no intention of mobilizing educators statewide for a fight. Instead, the bureaucracy has crafted a public relations stunt under the vague and noncommittal slogan, “We Can’t Wait.”
2. Panama’s government suspends constitutional rights to suppress worker protests
Since March, nationwide protests in Panama have erupted including by indigenous groups and unions who oppose a new pension law.
*****
Authorities have claimed that protesters were violent, looting businesses, vandalizing the local airport, and setting fire to a local baseball field with police inside. “Looting and violence” are common buzzwords used by the ruling class to attempt to turn the local population against struggling workers and often have very little basis in reality.
Last week President Mulino declared a five-day state of emergency and instituted Operation Omega, which suspended several articles of the Panamanian constitution relating to the right to assembly and movement, the prevention of unlawful searches and seizures, the right to not be held without charges indefinitely, and other basic human rights. The state of emergency was set to expire on June 25, but has was subsequently extended to June 29. Over 2,500 police officers have been deployed in order to beat workers into submission.
3. Glastonbury’s defiant stand for Palestine and the radicalization of the working class and youth
There are events which burst through the crust of official politics and media-managed opinion and let popular sentiment erupt to the surface. Saturday afternoon at the UK’s Glastonbury music festival was one of those.
The days leading up to it were filled with demands from columnists and politicians for Irish-language rap trio Kneecap to be struck from the lineup of the world’s largest greenfield music and arts festival, with a 210,000 capacity.
This reached its peak with Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer telling The Sun they should not be allowed to perform. The caretakers of bourgeois public opinion were worried that the band’s pro-Palestinian stand—for which member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (stage name Mo Chara) has been hit with trumped-up terror charges—would find massive popular support.
In the end, it was even worse for them than they feared.
4. Democrats begin “doomsday” budget planning for Chicago area transit
The “doomsday” planning is part of a broad assault by the American oligarchy on public services nationwide, led by the Trump administration, which is being assisted at every level by the Democratic Party. In Philadelphia, the transit system is facing a shocking 45 percent cut.
5. Pike River movie undermined by glaring omissions
Notwithstanding the film’s realistic dramatization of the tragedy—and there are some strong moments—it must be judged not just by what the filmmakers have focused on but what they omit.
As the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand and the World Socialist Web Site have meticulously documented, Pike River was a disaster waiting to happen—the result of the systematic dismantling of industrial safety over decades by successive Labour and National governments, with the active assistance of the trade unions. By 2010, the Department of Labour’s specialist mines inspectorate had just two inspectors.
6. Spanish unions try to impose new sellout contract on Cádiz metalworkers
The metalworkers of Cádiz are especially known for their struggle and combativeness. Today, the union bureaucracies are trying to ensure to this and future governments that there will be no more mobilizations in Cádiz that could serve as an example or unite with other struggles in Spain or internationally, even as brutal attacks against the working class are looming. The workers of Cádiz not only face the companies in this sector, but also the demands of Spanish and NATO imperialism.
7. Trump revokes protected status for over half a million Haitian immigrants
Three days after the US Embassy in Haiti warned US citizens, “Do not travel to Haiti” and “Depart Haiti as soon as possible,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from that country.
*****
There is no question that the termination of TPS protection will lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. Two centuries of foreign colonial and imperialist intervention following the only successful slave revolt in history have left the country in a state of collapse.
8. Traverse City officials intensify homeless crisis in northwest Michigan
Homelessness was once considered an exclusively urban problem, but it has infiltrated rural areas across the country, exposing many of the deep-seated flaws of capitalism. Northwest Michigan has experienced an even steeper increase than the national average, which surged 4 percent between 2022 and 2023.
9. 66 children in Gaza have died from malnutrition due to US-Israeli starvation campaign
Earlier this month, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that malnutrition is surging in Gaza at an “alarming” rate, with an average of 112 children admitted for treatment with malnutrition every single day since the start of 2025.
10. Senate advances Trump plan to gut social programs to benefit the super-rich
The US Senate voted by a 51-49 margin Saturday night to open debate on the major legislative package of the Trump administrative, which will provide $4 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy, cut $1 trillion or more from Medicaid and food stamps and pump hundreds of billions of additional dollars into the immigration police and the US military.
*****
While various factions of the Republican Party jockey for position, the Democratic Party maintains its posture of silent acquiescence to the looting of the Treasury to benefit the super-rich and further impoverish working people. The Democrats have confined themselves to ritualistic speechmaking and have not called a single protest, let alone a mass demonstration in Washington, against the cuts.
11. Shareholders of German steelmaker Thyssenkrupp reaffirm plan to break up company
The union bosses, with their upper five-, six- and seven-figure incomes, are responding by subordinating the company’s workforces to the government’s war policies and the profit interests of shareholders. The IG Metall executive board welcomed the government’s €1 trillion in war loans in a press statement as a “good signal.” When Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party) at the end of last year described the steel industry as “indispensable” for Germany, Tekin Nasikkol (the Chairman of the Thyssenkrupp AG Group Works Council) enthused that Scholz had “recognized the signs of the times” and “promised concrete measures to strengthen the system- and security-relevant steel industry.”
Workers’ jobs, however, cannot be defended by converting to war production. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East threaten the lives of all humanity. The defense of jobs must therefore be directly linked to the fight against militarism and war.
12. Jobs massacre spreads across key industries in Germany
While the German government is pouring hundreds of billions of euros into rearmament and war, the jobs massacre in the automotive, supplier, chemical, steel and other key industries continues unabated and is now extending to the services sector.
The trade unions are ensuring that job cuts proceed smoothly, and that any resistance is crushed at the outset. True to the motto “Everyone dies alone,” they isolate affected workforces from one another and downplay the scale of the disaster.
*****
The only sector currently booming in Germany is the business of death. Arms manufacturers are reporting full order books and fantastic profits.
13. New head of Britain’s MI6 is granddaughter of Ukrainian Nazi mass murderer
The revelations highlight both historical and contemporary relations between British imperialism and Ukrainian Nazis.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were collaborators of the Nazis as they murdered up to 1,600,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of members of the Red Army and Ukrainian, Polish opponents of the Nazis. The OUN/UPA is believed to have killed 25,000 Soviet servicemen, policemen and frontier guards, two-and-a-half thousand party workers, and about six hundred chairmen of collective farms and village councils, and to have massacred at least 100,000 Poles.
Yet the OUN’s founder, Stepan Bandera, is today hailed as a national hero by the far-right regime of Volodymyr Zelensky, of which the UK is a leading ally and military supplier in the proxy war against Russia.
Whatever the official claims that Blaise Metreweli, a career spy since her days at Cambridge University, had no knowledge of her grandfather’s politics and was never informed by her family or her superiors, she is the product of the fetid anti-communist milieu within British ruling circles, of which Ukrainian expat families make up an important component.
14. Top Australian union bureaucrats join Labor’s “economic reform roundtable”
Meeting the Trump administration’s demand to further boost military spending to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) would cost the federal budget almost $210 billion extra over a decade, according to Parliamentary Budget Office figures.
That demand was first issued publicly by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth four weeks ago at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue Indo-Pacific military and strategic forum in Singapore. Hegseth insisted that this was necessary to prepare for an “imminent” war against China, which he provocatively accused of seeking military hegemony over the Indo-Pacific.
*****
A warning must be sounded. The union bureaucrats are totally committed to this offensive. In fact, the Albanese government’s convening of a “roundtable” takes to a new level the partnership formalized by the “Jobs and Skills Summit” that the government convened soon after first taking office in 2022.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
